The web site for the 2nd Edition of The Design Way has gone live:

The Design Way site

http://www.thedesignway.net/  

Looking at Design: Keynote by Harold Nelson

http://www.knowledge-through-design.uni-kiel.de/

Coming soon!

The Design Way

Intentional Change in an Unpredictable World

Second Edition, MIT Press (2012)

Harold G. Nelson and Erik Stolterman

Humans did not discover fire--they designed it. Design is not defined by software programs, blueprints, or font choice. When we create new things--technologies, organizations, processes, systems, environments, ways of thinking--we engage in design. With this expansive view of design as their premise, in The Design Way, Harold Nelson and Erik Stolterman make the case for design as its own culture of inquiry and action. They offer not a recipe for design practice or theorizing but a formulation of design culture’s fundamental core of ideas. These ideas--which form “the design way”--are applicable to an infinite variety of design domains, from such traditional fields as architecture and graphic design to such nontraditional design areas as organizational, educational, interaction and healthcare design.

     Nelson and Stolterman present design culture in terms of foundations (first principles), fundamentals (core concepts), and metaphysics, and then discuss these issues from both learner’s and practitioner’s perspectives. The text of this second edition is accompanied by new detailed images, “schemas” that visualize, conceptualize, and structure the authors’ understanding of design inquiry. This text itself has been revised and expanded throughout, in part in response to reader feedback.

Harold G. Nelson was 2009–2010 Distinguished Professor of Design at Carnegie Mellon University and is currently Senior Instructor in the Graduate School of Business and Public Policy at the Naval Postgraduate School and President of Advanced Design Institute. Erik Stolterman is Professor of Informatics and Dept. Chair in the School of Informatics and computing at Indiana University Bloomington

The reclamation of endangered or abandoned ideas

Claims by idea assassins that systems thinking is dead, design thinking is dead, innovation is dead, are attempts to claim credit for hits never consummated. In addition, some consultants are famous for taking good ideas and turning them into fads. Businesses and governmental agencies are famous for taking fads and turning them into bad ideas that are then abandoned by both when the oversimplified or misshaped concepts fail to deliver cheap or easy solutions. Whether declared dead or abandoned the ideas remain viable in the right environments in interaction with the right people.

For example the term innovation is used in ways that make it difficult to discern what someone actually means when they are championing it or abandoning it. Is it creativity, is it implementation, is it market share, is it....? When innovation is declared dead what actually is being declared to be no longer among us?

Innovation has been assumed up to the present to be a positive thing (where alive and well). If we assume the term means (as I do) bringing something into the world and making it part of people’s lives there follows concerns for why that would be automatically assumed to be positive. Crack cocaine is one of the most successful innovations in American history. It is found everywhere at every level of society. Even though it can be declared a successful innovation it is not necessarily a 'good' innovation.

Discerning the assumptions behind the term innovation as it is popularly used is a challenge. Innovation is not the same thing as creativity. If democracy (a very old idea) becomes a real part of the governance of a people who have only been under some form of dictatorial rule (tribal, political, religious etc.) it can be considered an innovation in their lives but certainly not a novel, new or creative form of governance in human affairs.

Implementation and innovation are often interchanged as terms. Implementation is an executive function. It is the activity of making something happen or putting something into effect. Implementation occurs on behalf of someone—while innovation is usually treated as a sales function. It is an activity that attempts to influence people to buy, consume, behave, adapt, etc.

The distinction between implementation and innovation is not a judgmental call. Innovation often leads to happy outcomes as in the case of Apple. Paraphrasing Steve Jobs—consumers don’t know what they want until they are shown it. Of course changing people’s behavior through innovation (the new fad among some designers) rather than serving them through implementation raises a number of concerns.

The reasons for innovation can be very different depending on the intention and purposes of the innovators (the same is true for implementation and implementers). It can lead to reformation  (change of means) or transformation (change of ends) in a social system as pointed out by Russell Ackoff. Innovation and implementation are subset activities of designing. Designing is also the strategy used in formation—the implementation of a desired new form of reality.

Innovation is an example of a vital and viable idea that needs to be more clearly developed and understood through an ongoing dialogue rather than being cut off in its prime by assassination attempts or abandonment.  

Steve Jobs 1955 - 2011

It is with great sadness that we note the passing of one of the greatest designers to have lived and worked in recent memory. He changed our material world for the better and set standards for quality and innovation that will not soon be matched if ever. He is greatly missed. Our condolences to his family and friends. RIP Steve.

Everything Real is Not True

Decision makers want to be able to make good decisions. Decisions that will at the very least make the company money, the nonprofit effective, or the governmental agency politically popular. They want to make decisions that lead to better products, services, or organizational behavior. They also want to be seen as effective leaders worth the money, prestige and trust they desire or have invested in them. The problem is that good, let alone great, decisions seem harder and harder to come by.

Confidence in leaders or even the concept of leadership is very low at the moment—so low that a lot of public discussion deals with how to get along without the present crop of leaders. Professional literature deals with the availability of new prescriptive recipes which, when followed correctly, guarantee to bring certainty and success to decision making with or without good leadership. The market overflows with workshops and training sessions that promise to provide the right sequence of experiences that lead to painless, accessible, and cost effective problem solving abilities, which in turn promise to consistently provide solutions to complex problems embedded in confusing circumstances or better yet provide ready-made answers.

The desire for consistency and certainty has been part of the human condition for as long as we know. The earliest cosmologies and associated rites and rituals were all meant to give structure to chaos and mystery but there always seemed to be less predictability than desired and more unpredictability than tolerable. Ancient decision makers would go through great effort and cost to ask the Oracle at Delphi for a simple answer to their straight forward question only to be given responses that, by necessity, required deeper thinking on the questioner's side. The early Christians found that their leader spoke only in parables leaving centuries of interpretation of what the true answers were.

Despite the apparent popularity of these and other traditional means for accessing of wisdom, decision makers have continued to look for other less opaque methods of inquiry that would provide information that was more accessible, straight to the point, transparent, accurate, consistent and stable over time. In the Western tradition the right approach to coming up with accurate answers to questions seeking the basis for good decision making was soon identified as the outcome of rational thought using the protocols of the scientific method.  This approach worked so well for gaining a better understanding of the natural world and for the creation of sophisticated technology that it was only natural that managers, administrators and others in leadership roles would come to depend on the same design of inquiry for decisions that the scientists used.

However this scientized approach, with some exceptions, has not provided the kind of guarantee of good outcomes expected. This comes from what I believe is a confusion between what is true and what is real. Science can only determine that which is true but managers and others must deal with what is real as well.  I make the distinction between what is true and what is real in the following way. A painting by Cezanne is real, the atomic weight of copper is true. An experience is real, a scientific observation is true. An organization is real, a proven fact is true. An individual's perspective is real, a predictable event is true.

Determining what is true comes from accurate descriptions and explanations through controlled observation (William James' "tough-minded" empiricism). The true also comes from careful abstract reasoning and logic (William James' "tender-minded" rationalism). The real on the other hand is primarily revealed through actions taken by intention as formed by judgment. The real is complex, too complex to grasp in any comprehensive way. The real is unique and particular at any time and place. The real cannot be generalized and universalized unless abstracted into categories and patterns of qualities.

Good decisions and right actions do not and cannot arise from what is true alone. They must be grounded in the particularity of the real. Not recognizing this leads decision makers into analysis paralysis where focus on what’s true leads to unending branching. Decisions and actions must be based on what is real in addition to what is true. This is a symmetry however, not a polarity. That is, it is a unity rather than a compromise or conflict between the two. The binary relationship as shown below needs to be preserved in the process of good decision-making to assure that neither is negated or made dominate in relation to the other. It must also be recognized that both the true and the real are only the basis for decision making and not the means.

           

The pressure on educators of decision-makers and the educated decision-makers themselves to locate their work in the scientific tradition has led to the deformation of what is real into the pretense of that which is true—not bothering to stop at even the level of compromise. Formal educational curriculum, professional development programs and training methods supporting decision-making and leadership roles have been well developed in the realm of that which is true but not enough has been done in the development of similar areas of support in the realm of that which is real. There is a clear difference between what business, civil and governmental organizations need from educational programs and what academic programs provide for instance.  An example of the contrasting divergent needs of education and business is represented by Foreman1 as a relationship between academic orientation and business requirements (neither being systemic which is another issue in itself). This is an instance of the split between what is ‘simply’ true and what is ‘really’ true:

In an article in the Harvard Business Review2 the professional intellect of an organization is said to operate on four levels of increasing importance:  1) cognitive knowledge, 2) advanced skills, 3)systems understanding, 4) self-motivated creativity. Only the first deals with what is ‘simply’ true. The others are in the realm of that which is ‘really’ true—i.e. both real and true.

Decision-making and leadership need to be grounded in the tradition of science and logic but not to the exclusion of judgment and reality. Design is an emerging field of inquiry for action that blends the distinction between what is true and what is real into a balanced systemic relationship.

1. Foreman, David C. 1995. "The Use of Multimedia Technology

    for Training in Business and Industry." Multimedia Monitor 13(7):  22-27

2. Quinn, James Brain, Philip Anderson, and Sydney Finkelstein. 1996 "Managing

    Professional Intellect" Harvard Business Review, March-April;  71-80

What's the Trick?

The recent spate of articles on Steve Job’s resignation at Apple (too often sounding disturbingly like obituaries) have focused on the mystery of Job’s approach to his work. They are representative of the ongoing quest to find the recipe or secret sauce that made Apple’s products so dominant in the market place. The focus on design is always mentioned as Apples core competence. Job’s character is often critiqued but mostly the center of attention is on trying to discern his—i.e. Apple’s—design methods and materials. ‘Design thinking’ has become the normative category to use when referring to these or anyone’s methods or approaches to designing.

‘Design thinking’ in fact has become the highly recommended approach for businesses and governments to take. ‘Design thinking’ is being touted in text and video as the next best thing for solving complex dynamic problems faced by business and governmental agencies in today’s admittedly complex and rapidly changing world. However ‘design thinking’ is not the same thing as design inquiry, or design action—i.e. design—and the confusion has serious consequences. ‘Design thinking’ is being sold as a commodity, a branded recipe or set of steps that is supposed to guarantee successful outcomes by revealing the right answers  in response to whatever problem descriptions are fed into clever algorithms. Design is not primarily about solving problems however. It is about something different.

When taking a problem focused approach to design, leaders, decision makers and stakeholders can constantly skirt taking responsibility and accountability for their decisions and actions by focusing on methods—by avoiding the courageous and grasping for the certain. Rollo May’s classic The Courage to Create and Joseph Campbell’s Hero of a Thousand Faces are examples of an alternative perspective of what it means to be courageous and willing to take risks and why. Courage is not the same as the aggressiveness acted out in office politics and political governance. A focus on courage provides an alternative perspective of the heroic individual. It is dramatically different from the kind of ‘in charge’ hero of popular culture that is the anathema of those touting the importance of the group over the individual and in the process diminishing both. Both May and Campbell provide a view of the systemic interdependency of courageous individuals and their essential connection to the well being of collective lives.

Few business or governmental leaders are representative of the second type of heroic figure and it seems their constituency like it that way. Most everyone colludes in demanding a risk free environment, no worry decisions, and no accountabilities or responsibilities. People in charge are happy to collect their rewards for following prescribed steps, accepted routines and approved procedures—arriving at the right answers, just like we were all taught to do in school.

As Russ Ackoff points out <http://www.acasa.upenn.edu/p19.pdf>, panaceas are ever in demand in business, governmental agencies and other social organizations. One look at a typical Harvard Business Review’s table of contents reveals that the dominant focus is on numbering—numbered steps, numbered categories, numbered everything. We all like the safe feeling of limits set by solid numbers. A methodological certainty that saves us from having to take responsibility for our making sense of the chaos we face daily and making difficult judgments about what actions we ought to take in any situation—all without having guarantors in place to protect us from failures and unintended consequences.

Design is about courage and not about guaranteed outcomes. It is about competency, skill, ability, and character, brought into the service of others—clients, stakeholders, society and the greater good. It is a ‘conspiracy’—a breathing together—of people who understand the true nature of the challenge and the necessity of taking it head on without a bag full of ‘tricks’. There are plenty of people with bags of ‘tricks for treats’ that feed the need in organizations and institutions for easy, accessible and certain approaches to overwhelmingly complex challenges. One of my favorite political cartoons by Danziger published in the Christian Science Monitor several years ago, caught the spirit of our political and business leaders’ habit of always looking for ‘the trick’ rather than looking to themselves for the courage and competence to become designers of the real world.